Help Me Choose A New Motto For Alliteration Ink And Win Free Books!

TL;DR: I need a new slugline that describes what I publish. I’m running a small contest to help me choose a new one; winner gets over $60 in eBooks.

So here’s the thing:

I seem to be a “real publisher” now.

It kind of happened without me noticing it – and just like others have reflected about being a “real writer” – I became a “real publisher” when I stopped worrying about what people called me and just started doing the work.

But there is a change. And when I looked over the Alliteration Ink website, I realized… it doesn’t match what Alliteration Ink is now.

“Get excited and make stuff?” That whole “publishing because I can” thing? Made perfect sense four years ago for me as a business1. I was publishing to show that it could be done. Now? That’s not news. And since Alliteration Ink got out of the publishing services game, it really doesn’t make sense today.

But that leaves me without a catchy summary of what Alliteration Ink is.

Other small publishers tend to have a focus on a particular genre, or type of book (or go whole hog the other direction). And I don’t want to do that, either.

What do I choose to publish? Good stories and poems. Things that push genre, or are hard to pin to any one particular genre. Anthologies full of stories that poke at the way you think, poems that are literary but not self-conciously so, or novels that I find compelling. As Anton Cancre pointed out in his review of What Fates Impose:

The big thing about What FatesImpose that will be either a huge draw or a repellent, depending on yourtastes, is how hard it is to ascribe a genre to most of the stories presented.Sarah Hans’ “Charms” provides a great example of this. It carries a largelynoirish feel in a somewhat detective tale occurring amidst urban fantasy magicbut it’s kind of a romance as well, while dealing with issues of identity andthe physical expression thereof. I really liked that aspect of it, but I knowit isn’t for everyone.

Don’t get me wrong – this is a feature, not a bug.

In 2014 I have or have solid plans to publish three anthologies, two single-author collections, a novella, two novels, and launch a periodical. With potentially two to four more titles.

And even though these works span several genres, the odds are pretty good that if you like one of them, you’ll like the others as well… but I can’t think of a way to sum that up. “Publishing stories that don’t suck” is true, but… well, I’d rather phrase it in a positive way, and a bit more politely.

So here’s where you come in.

Suggest a slugline for me. In the comments here. On Facebook. On Twitter (either @uriel1998 or @AlliterationInk ). Or send me an e-mail.

The best one will get the entirety of my catalog in digital formats (ePub, Kindle, PDF), and five other random ones will get a digital copy of any one book in my catalog. That’s over sixty bucks worth of books for the winner!